Assume God actually created humanity not the other way around. Humankind also holds the belief. How would anything look different than now? I cant think of how anything would be different than it is now, your OP doesn't hold water..

What does this have to do with the post you quoted?
You said "the value of the universe" and I responded to that.
Why did you bring up clothes and cities, how do I live "inside" of the earth and why would I want to place a value on the planet earth????


Irrelevant.

A lot of religious people seem to have a poverty of imagination, and thus are having trouble grasping the argument. It's interesting.

So I wonder if this will make it clearer.

Australian aborigines believe in something called the Dreamtime, in which giant Australian animals and human roamed around and made various land features. All of their religions are solely concerned with Australia and Australian features.

Do you think this Australia-centric view and specific and universal references to Australian fauna is more or less likely to make their religion divinely revealed? Why would a revealed religion simply mention Australian fauna in various implausible ways, in a way that's highly aligned with how tribes make their (untrue) myths and religions?

Similarly, if a heavily moralizing ethnic group, with a highly paternal social structure and concern with the the history of their own ethnic group, create a moralizing religion (reflecting the norms of their age) with a very male Godhead and a powerful focus on the ethnic group's history to the exclusion of others, is this religion more or less likely to be divinely revealed?

In case this still isn't clear, let's travel to another planet. It's a watery planet, and the intelligent life are squid-like. They claim their God has made them in his image. Their bible contains information - direct from God - on which sea creatures they can eat (cloven of fin is forbidden), and various moralities (thou shalt not display false colors on thy morphable skin).

2000 years ago, a great squid called Jesquid appeared. He waved his appendages in beautiful ways, and was gracious to the lowly squid. He said the squid-God - his father - had sent him. He promised that if you believed in him, you would go to squid heaven, where the water was always clear and well oxygenated, and fish always plentiful, and there were no parasites or predators, where you could live forever in harmony and beauty. He said the only way to this magical ocean was to believe in Him. If you didn't believe in Him, you'd go to squid hell, which is like the undersea volcanic vents the squid fear.

Anyway, He represented a threat to the squid hierarchy, so the dominant squids trapped Him in a clam. Three days later, some squid witnessed Him rising up and out of the ocean, in a miracle.

Jesquid is identical to Jesus. If you visited another planet and saw such a religion (assuming you'd never come across a Jesus-like figure before), what would think? Would you believe it was divinely inspired, or more likely a creation of backward and superstitious squid?

You do write imaginative, creative posts. Its funny that religious people are often criticized for imagining an Invisible Supreme Being yet you claim the opposite-that they lack imagination.

My favorite Aborigine movie is the Last Wave, although Walkabout was good too. I recommend them.

Not sure why you picked a giant squid to represent Jesus. Hard to relate to that as a Messiah. Maybe you saw a Giant Squid movie lately. Maybe its from the Avatar movie.

Your post is kind of off topic. Anyway one of the main reason lots of people for centuries follow the teachings (e.g. love thy neighbor) of Jesus is because they think it makes for a more civilized world. They heard what he said and like it and practiced it. It is the same for any other spiritual teacher like Buddha.

I have day of poker, playing tennis, and watching football ahead of me. Will be fun.

Then I'm just confused. If you were aware of these arguments, why did you say they didn't exist?

Hmm "they think it makes for a more civilised world" and how wrong or silly the masses has been, if they can't look back at history to see the horror its caused.

The most productive people throughout time in society have had to fear religious people, that would murder them or claim witchcraft.
I'm pretty sure if I were to go back in history, have schizophrenia and claim that I could do some miracles with some wit, the stories would probably be slowly altered to make me seem like the son of god as well.

The thing that gets me, is the proclamation of its great because lots of people follow it and I'm living a good life. You may be living a good life cause you're on the side of the world, where its hard for you to do anything wrong and get ****ed over but its possible because this world is random as throwing dice.

I don't believe that anyone really goes to hell, not even the most sinister people and personally think that everyone gets their wish when they die.
Anything is possible, i'm wishing for reincarnation to get another ride through life again that seems a lot more fun + challenging than sitting up in a so called heaven where all is gravy.

Quite simply.

If plausibility is primarily derived from evidence (or lack thereof), and we have no evidence of intelligent life anywhere except Earth....

Must we debate this further?

For what it's worth, if I travelled to another planet, and found out that they worshipped Jesquid, I'd view that as evidence in favor of theistic religion. It would be quite a coincidence for them to have a religion so similar to Christianity purely through chance.

That being said, I think this argument could use some more rigor (instead of just handwaving towards Bayes Theorem, actually lay it out in those terms). I take it that what is going on here is that we are comparing two different theories of the rise of Christianity. One theory (call it the naturalistic theory) says that Christianity is the result of purely natural causes, i.e. some combination of human psychology, facts about human social groupings, and the natural world. The other theory (the supernatural theory) says that Christianity is the result of divine agency, that there is a god that did the things claimed by Christianity.

Your claim is that the probability of the supernatural theory is very low because the facts claimed by religion are what we would expect if the naturalistic theory is true. But that isn't enough. After all, those facts claimed by religion might also be what we would expect if the supernatural theory is true.

That is, if Jesus really were the son of God who died for people's sins, etc., then wouldn't we expect that to be communicated to people? And yes, there are lots of false religions, but that can be explained by Christians in a pretty similar way to how you explain it naturalistically, except they can also throw in some demonic agency if they want or a more moralistic tinge.

What you would really have to do is show that the facts about religion are not what we would expect if Jesus is the son of God, etc. And this is really tough for an atheistic. What really does follow from the thesis that there is a God who loves humans?

Well, one claim being made by :::grimReaper::: is that the age of the universe would be shorter. If God viewed humans as the pinnacle or purpose of the universe, then he wouldn't have them only appear so late in the game. But, really? This seems both very speculative about God's motives (why should time be a problem for God? Is it that he is getting bored?), and also relies on some claims about Christianity that don't seem very important to me (eg many Christians are okay with intelligent extraterrestial life).

I think you are also bringing up another issue, which is that we should expect God to introduce new ideas if he really existed. But it isn't clear to me that this didn't happen. Sure, God didn't give us the theory of relativity in the New Testament, but various religions, including especially major ones like Christianity, have had a profound influence on intellectual and social life.

I think there is at least one likely implication, which is that there wouldn't be huge amounts of needless suffering. In other words, the argument from evil to the non-existence of god. Other people have posited that there wouldn't be much reasonable nonbelief.

I also think we have potential overfitting problems here. After all, it is no surprise that the naturalistic theories on religion are compatible with the facts about religion--those facts are already known to scientists and so guide their naturalistic theories of religion. What would be much stronger evidence is if we could compare these theories to previously unknown or new religions.

So I'm not sure that you are really adding anything here that actually lowers the probability of Christianity being true. In my view, the real disagreement is over the prior probability of Christianity being true. You think the prior probability of there being a God is low, of his having a son named Jesus who preached and then was killed 2000 years ago is low, and so on. I agree with you about this. But I also think that it is notoriously difficult to find common ground in these kinds of arguments over what the prior probabilities should be.

Not impossible though. I think you can claim that the great variety of mutually contradictory religions is evidence for the claim that the probability of any one being true is relatively low. However, even here religious person has a reply. They can point out that there are potentially confounding factors here. That is, Christianity is not just median religion, but is the largest religion in the world. Alternatively, they can speculate that there is a common core to all or almost all religions that is true, even if most of the rest of its mythology is false.

Every religion has supernatural claims, not one of them has been proven, so it's very likely that every religion is an invention by man.

Also: Using logic to make a point for religion to exist is def. the wrong way and you are a mod here....you should REALLY stop this:

You talk like god exists,but there is no proof at all.
Please turn on your brain before posting.
You are supposed to be neutral as a mod not to promote fairytales.

Or with the words of your BFF:

Sorry, but "How would anything look different" is not an argument is support of or against anything. Also, I'd prefer the amount of fluff in this thread to be at a minimum, so if you have any peripheral and legitimate arguments against atheism, we can address it in a separate thread.

No major religion says that the earth is the center of the universe.
No major religion says that humans are the only intelligent creatures in the universe
No religion says that God created the universe solely in order to create humans
There is no particular reason to think that that God would need make it that way.
There is no particular need for God to make humans much earlier in time.
There is no particular reason for God to make the universe much smaller to better “fit” humans. (God could have any sort of other purposes for the rest of the universe.)
Humans created in the "image of God" certainly doesn't mean that humans have the same physical appearance as God and no religion thinks that. (It more likely refers to having higher order free intellect and a moral conscience).
These are all false premises.

So any speculation about the plausibility of God creating man or vice versa based on any of them is going to be flawed.

You misread his post. His post was to help people who are still struggling to understand the OP. The OP doesn't rest on the claim that nonhuman intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe, but it sure helps the argument.

No actually, every single one your posts have been off topic and have added 0 value here. Your very last post is on topic though, but I'll respond to it a little later.

Please walk me through it slowly. I must be missing something here.

Precisely what premise, if any, does the 'argument' in the OP rely on?

I thought that it relied on the premise that the rest of the universe (beyond Earth) is somehow relevant/important...

If I'm wrong on that, then what premise does it rely on?

False

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geocen...to_geocentrism

I did not imply that, but it does help my argument

I did not imply that.


Point taken, this is where we both diverge of purely logical thinking and instead reexamine our faiths, i.e. what is more plausible: a god-resembling man created man in his own image in the last few seconds of time, or did man create a man-resembling God as he came into existence in the last few seconds of time.

I've already addressed this, but similar to what I stated just above, there's no way I can disprove that God simply created the rest of the 99.99999% of the universe simply for entertainment. It's a matter of faith of which seems more plausible.

First, it's interesting how religious folk conveniently reinterpret their religious texts simply because they are simply uncomfortable with the word of their god. Second, the statement on physical appearance is simply false, e.g. many Hindus believe that their gods physically resemble their deities.

But most importantly, while I've mainly referred to the physical appearance in this thread because it makes my point much easier to grasp, my argument extends in higher generality, which is why I sometimes say "human-centric" rather than "human-resembling". Even with your reinterpretation, my argument still holds because even if religion says god created man in his own image, even abstractly, it still relates God -- the supposedly eternal creator of the Universe and the most supreme being -- to man, and therefore places man at the pedestal of the universe.

Frankly, I don't think simple propositional logic will work here, though I think Tooth tries to formalize my argument using Bayes theorem and Occam's Razor. The best I can do is reexplain.

Basically, I am attacking a very specific type of religion or belief system: a belief system that puts man at equal importance with the universe (all mainstream religions do this). A religion can do this in many ways, even if they don't explicitly say so. Let's define God as the creator of the universe. If a religion says that God literally resembles a man, then clearly such a religion has denoted man as the lifeform of the utmost highest importance at the cosmological level among millions of other species, because according to the religion, only one species, man, resembles god. Furthermore, God's resemblance to man doesn't need to be literal, it can be abstract, just as long as some connection is made between God and man. In fact, the connection need not to be between God and specifically man, it just needs to be exclusive to one species, e.g. God created Velociraptor in his own image, but I won't get into that to avoid confusion.

This is where I ask us to examine the religion's plausibility in two perspectives: 1) A perspective with respect to time and 2) A perspective with respect to space.

The perspective with respect to time is as follows: If God needed to exist during the creation of the universe, then clearly, the human form existed at the creation of the universe, 13 billion years ago (as we understand). But if man's form has existed since the creation of the universe, when why has man just appeared in the last 0.01% of Earth's current age, which is 4 billion years ago? You can rebut that God intends us to rule Earth for billions of years and we are simply lucky to be the first ones here. Or that God intended for man to exist only for a short period of time with respect to the age of the Earth, therefore it's not surprising that we have only existed for 0.01% of the Earth's age. Or that our measuring equipment are incorrect, and that the age of the Earth and universe are far less. These rebuttals are sound (and there may be more), but in my opinion, are less plausible than the simple alternative that man created a religion featuring a man-resembling God, and therefore that man placed a man-resembling creator at the birth of the universe.

The perspective with respect to space is that man occupies a grain of salt among the cosmos (Earth: 10^-9 ly, Visible universe: 92b ly), yet man is supposedly the most important species on the cosmological level. You can rebut and say that God created the rest of the universe for simply man's awe. Or, that man exists on other planets. But man existing on other planets is unlikely, even on identical Earths, because there are many feasible ways life can adapt to its environment, which is evidenced by thousands of species that can successfully coexist in the same ecosystem, and by noting the diversity of geographically-unique species that evolve due to geographic speciation on this very planet. Again, I ask which is more plausible, such rebuttals that I've mentioned (there may be more), or the simple alternative that man is not the most important species at the cosmological level.

In both instances, what is 'more plausible' will not be determined by what is 'more plausible' but rather by what 'aligns more closely with your religious beliefs'.

This is why the argument is not particularly convincing/not a particularly solid indicator of man-made-God. I will grant you that it is unfortunate that appeals to plausibility in religious debate are most often a dead-end in terms of any kind of constructive dialogue. People simply hold such beliefs too tightly to allow for plausibility wiggle-room.

Just for perspective, Man was first born of earthly creatures and has been in existence since the beginning of time. Thee is no gap as far as the existence o Man is concerned. He just didn't look like most would assume without consideration.

If one goes back in time there exists 3 states of consciousness/entities or precursors of the earth. going through 2 previous existences of earth we come to a state known in esoteric parlance as the "Saturn" state of being. Subsequence to "Saturn' was the "Old Sun" followed by the "Old Moon" and then our Earthly state.

These states or planets are not the planets of today but more as realms of consciousness in which the human being sojourned.

As an example the "Saturn" state would be considered to contain the entirety of the space traversed by our present Saturn but of note is that there was no materiality as we know it today. If one could go back and s=use our present senses within this state of being (which we cannot use our senses) this state would be the realm of "heat". If one traveled through this realm there would be varying degrees of warmth and cold much like being in an oven. Only warmth/cold would be appreciated, no light, no water, no matter but entirely warmth.

Within this large cosmic oven, so to speak one would note inscribed areas much like beads on a mulberry fruit. These were the ancient ancestors of human beings. The conscious here was a consciousness deeper than our present consciousness of deep sleep. The human being was, at that time, more of an automaton but within the particular beings time was to begin as were our sense organs.

If one were to ask as to what about prior to this state of being the question falters as it becomes incomprehensible within the intellect of present man and in fact I cannot begin to offer any solution to the question.

Pertinent is that the human being was ensconced within a hierarchy of Angelic Beings who insured and actually for some realized their existence through the human being. Explaining; I see a man after I perform an act and I see myself in his eyes. I am defined by my reflection within the other being.

The Angels in Christian nomenclature are:

Seraphim or Spirits of Love

Cherubim or Spirits of Harmony

Thrones or Spirits of Will

Kyriotetes or Spirits of Wisdom

Dynamis or Spirits of Movement

Exousiai or Spirits of Form also known as Elohim

Archai or Spirits of Time or Personality

Archangeloi or Spirits of Fire

Angels or Sons of Twilight Life

Above these are the three Logoi of the Divine Trinity: Father, Son or Word, Holy spirit

Better reading is : Occult Science , an Outline by Rudolph Steiner

http://wn.rsarchive.org/Books/GA013/...013_index.html

Ive met religious people who have said some of theses things. Mostly base on the Book of Genesis.

As speculative as rebuttals provided in one of your links...?

I don't see the big deal with a mod posting. On-topic posts that further the discussion should be welcome here.

Theology is the study of fairy-tales, therefore discussing fairytales is fair game in "Religion, God and Theology" imo

This is a very beautifully written post. I think though that what Veedezz is saying is that there may not even be a squid Jesus. In our vast universe, we may be the only inhabitants. So we have our own unique personal Jesus that created the universe in its wholeness for our viewing pleasure. He takes great pains in explaining to us how we can and cannot copulate and although he lives on an uninhabitable planet, he takes the form of a human being and he visits our planet on occasion for the purpose of authoring a book.

You deny Man the ability to perceive the cosmos for in and of itself. What you are offering is a cynical and skeptical approach which offers nothing. The perspective of time you have offered (.1 of whatever) is really relegated to a historical written approach to Man which can't really see beyond the beginnings of the so called historical writings.

There is obviously a period of time in which mankind began to write and for now we might consider Egyptian hieroglyphs as one of these beginnings but you can't use this ill conceived notion that Man only exists as far as we can see his written historical word or also including relics of past civilizations.

The idea of other worlds is pure speculation for one might just as well debate as to how many angels are present on the head of a pin. the cutting edge here is that matter rules during our day and in your posts. Mockery of the human soul is also evident in your posts as real men attempt to explain and perceive a cosmic entelechy which includes the human being as does the potassium at your feet.

You speak of time and space as if they were separate from the individual man but truth is; Man is ensconced within time and space and so the knowledge of Man or "self knowledge"(not the brooding type) is within men and men are within it as we are contained within the cosmos and not third persons as one might believe.

To say that we are separate is the difficulty for then we are speaking as if a finger could be cut out of our body and go on speaking to the universe. We are like that finger irrespective as to whether we can move about on the earth.

There can be some conclusions from this once the concepts are taken without personal precondition. The religions speak as Man is the "Image of God". If one understands that Man is within the cosmos and that , as noted by a previous poster, "As above, so below" we can see that he is in the image of this cosmic entelechy which is known as the "Father God".

The song goes that knowledge of external reality brings forth knowledge of Man and knowledge within brings forth knowledge of the cosmos.

THIS IS FOR MR.TT.

As an aside, the mods are and have been one of us and have always posted, much to our benefit. You would do well to reread the posts you have taken issue with , without precondition, and it may display a presentation within reason and understanding which is the only way to come to grips when studying religion for then we can all understand as apposed to some strident trance state which only can be appreciated by an individual.

END OF MR. TT; carry on, I'll be in the area all day.

Believe it or not religion does have a thought borne content, within reason, otherwise we would be in the land of the Sibyls , those underworld creatures devoid of reason to whom the Hebrew Prophets kept within boundaries.

Michelangelo's works with the Hebrew Prophets juxtaposed to the demonic Sybils.

https://www.bing.com/images/search?q...0-24&sp=-1&sk=

I have to edit the thing about the mods for it was aimed at Mr. TT who thinks that mods should act as divine messengers and stay out of the fray. Sheeeez , lost in space, lost in space....

No, the history of man on Earth starts 200k years ago when the first anatomically similar humans walk the surface, regardless of when writing develops. I'm flexible extending this 1 million years if you want include close relatives and ancestors.

And other planets exist. It's not a matter of speculation.

I know this is going off topic, almost, but I'd like to offer the Sibyls with respect to the Hebrew Prophets.

As Heraclitis said:

The Sibyl, with frenzied mouth uttering things not to be laughed at, unadorned and unperfumed, yet reaches to a thousand years with her voice by aid of the god.'[5]

Within here is literally the uncontrolled frenzied manifestation within the being of man to which oracular prophecies were uttered. The Sibylline Books were a chaotic medley of utterances of the Sybil's and the Sibylline Books of ancient Rome were seen to be the prophetic works of the Roman Empire which I believe referred to 7 states of the Empire. This is lost whereas the Sibylline Books of the Grecian oracles are extant, in part, at least.

The reference of the Hebrew Prophets sitting in a calmed reflection is in contrast to the Sibyls in the painting of the Sistine Chapel. they were the individual buttress against the worst and most dangerous approach of humankind if the age of the Sibyls were to continue. Reason and mindful calm within as apposed to chaotic conundrums without; a Michelangelo with artistic understanding.

https://www.bing.com/images/search?q...gelo&FORM=IGRE